King Lear

Synopsis: Feature film version of the play. Widely criticised and a commercial failure, the film was received as an interesting deconstruction or completely unintelligible according to taste. The film makes the premise that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has wiped out all works of culture including Shakespeare’s plays. William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth sets out on a mission to reconstruct his ancestor’s work.
Language: English
Country: Switzerland; United States
Medium: Film
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Year of release: 1987
Duration: 90 mins; 8,132 feet

Director

Jean-Luc Godard

Producer

Menahem Golan; Yoram Globus

Cinematographer

Sophie Maintigneux

Cast

Burgess Meredith	Don Learo (Lear)
Molly Ringwald	Cordelia (Cordelia)
Woody Allen	Mr Alien (Fool)
Norman Mailer	The Great Writer
Peter Sellars	William Shakespeare Junior the Fifth

Notes: Budget $1.4m
Reviews: Durgnat, Raymond. Monthly Film Bulletin 649 (1988), pp 38-39.
Lanier, Douglas ‘Film Spin-Offs and Citations’ in Burt, Richard (ed). Shakespeares After Shakespeares: an Encyclopedia of the Bard in Mass Media and Popular Culture. 2 vols. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006. (pp. 193-4, entry 805).
Maerz, Jessica M. ‘Godard’s KING LEAR: Referents Provided upon Request’ in Literature/Film Quarterly v. 32, n.2 (! July 2004), pp. 108-114.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘The Importance of Being Perverse’, Chicago Reader, 8 April 1988: "Whatever might turn the film into ‘a Shakespeare play,' ‘a Mailer script,' ‘a story,' or even ‘a Godard film’ in the usual sense is purposefully subverted. The film aspires, like Cordelia, to be (and to say) "no thing," to exist and to function as a nonobject: ungraspable, intractable, unconsumable. For a movie that is concerned, like Shakespeare’s play, with ultimate essences rather than fleeting satisfactions, it is an aspiration that has an unimpeachable logic." Avaiiable at http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=7695 (accessed 7/2010).

British Universities Film & Video Council